Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:06:24 UTC
Having to type out "category" all the time gets annoying. Why not allow "cat" as well? Support for multiple "magic word links" ("temp" for "template", too) and perhaps even namespace abbreviations.
1) Too many conflicts likely 2) Localization issues 3) Compatibility issues
Ask your wiki admins to add things like [[Category:]] in edittools.
edittools? What is that and how would I add something to it?
"MediaWiki:Edittools" - "edittools" is a message which is treated as wiki text, and placed underneath the edit box in the standard editor. It's often the place where users insert, e.g. <charinsert> tags (from the extension) to provide convenient insertion points for boilerplate, special characters, etc.
Well, that's fine for macro-like things but I want built-in support for alternate link words. Really, I'm not asking for much--just support for "cat" vs. only just "category". Tell me how and I'll just hack yet another PHP file to add functionality...
Look for namespace aliases.
Look where?
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Namespaces particulary http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:%24wgNamespaceAliases I'd rather suggest to use either IRC channel #mediawiki on FreeNode or one of mail-lists, Bugzilla is not for this kind of dialogue.
Perfect--thanks! Here's what I added: $wgNamespaceAliases = array( 'Img' => 6, # 'img' => 6, 'Img_talk' => 7, # 'img_talk' => 7, 'Cat' => 14, # 'cat' => 14, 'Cat_talk' => 15, # 'cat_talk' => 15, 'Cat_chat' => 15, #Just for fun # 'cat_chat' => 15, 'Temp' => 10, # 'temp' => 10, 'Temp_talk' => 11, # 'temp_talk' => 11, ); I may even not need the capitalized versions but I haven't tested if commenting out capped versions will make capped versions redirect too (since I have lowercase links on). The only conflict is if interwiki links have the same names (which is why I don't reduce "MediaWiki" to "mw" since I use that for the interwiki link. Perhaps an alternate way to designate external links besides a single colon is needed, like an equals sign (=) or even a semi-colon (;)? Or perhaps a colon backslash (single only) akin to "http://" (:/)? As for Bugzilla, it's for enhancement requests too, which is what I entered...
The reason this was rejected as a core change is because of the likelihood of causing conflicts with custom namespaces, etc. It's quite possible to do this on a per-project basis using namespace aliases. BugZilla *is* for enhancement requests, but it's not a general question-and-answer forum, which is what this bug became as of about comment 5.
Dialog helps to flesh out a bug/enhancement request, Rob. I really don't see what the big deal is. In comment 9 I elaborated on the enhancement as rejections were brought up.
Once a request is rejected, pointless dialogue is a waste of time, and causes additional spam in inboxes. Your questions were about how to go about hacking MediaWiki, which is not an issue for the bug tracker, and specific support on namespace aliases, which is also not an issue for the bug tracker; both of these issues would have been good mailing list questions, for instance.
